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Comment by meuk | Hacker News Reader

You are mistaken, this is not a myth. Synchronous digital chips have a clock with a fixed frequency, and their working is fixed. So if it works, a chip perform exactly the same, regardless of age. If something's slower, it's software or pheripherals. Probably software (and that's why some people are so upset: hardware is getting faster, observed performance keeps degrading. I have to wait 10 minutes for my computer before I can start working, every day).

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The cooling system ages - dust accumulates and coolingpaste become less efficient - which in turn can cause more frequent throttling of the cpu. (technically a peripheral to the chp)

This is an important and often overlooked aspect of system aging. Heat dissipation is the primary performance bottleneck of modern CPUs (in truly CPU-bound tasks). There's a reason liquid nitrogen/helium cooling can enable dramatic over clocking.

Not entirely true either. Transistor aging is real and is becoming more relevant at the latest nodes. But what is important to remember is that a slower transistor is still being operated in a circuit switching at the original frequency, the result of that is incorrect calculations.

It won't take any longer to startup, it just won't startup in a usable state. Startup/tasks taking longer is definitely the software industry's doing.

https://semiengineering.com/transistor-aging-intensifies-10n... for more.

A few months ago I pulled out a machine with an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ processor that had lain unused for four or five years. It had difficulty booting, failing to POST a couple of times, and BSODing early in the Windows 2000 boot process several times, even once almost finishing booting. But the fascinating thing about it was that the clock frequency the BIOS was reporting was 532MHz, which is only double the FSB (266MHz), rather than the intended 13.5× (1800MHz).

After about ten attempts, I was no longer able to get it to POST at all. So I pulled it apart and scavenged its disk’s magnets, which was what I had been planning on doing anyway.

failed capacitors, corrupted/bad cmos data, nothing to do with aging silicon

Yes this CPU gen falls right into the golden age of the great capacitor plague.

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